Perhaps Tinetti knows how to lift Kiwi kids’ progress in schools – but don’t forget what happened when she was Education Minister
Responding to news that children in their first year of school will undergo phonics checks to help teachers understand their reading progress, former Education Minister Jan Tinetti bleated something about the government taking “another backwards step for education”.
“Erica Stanford is hellbent on a one-size-fits-all education system. National Standards have failed students before. Going back to standardised testing is taking us down the same path,” she said.
Moreover, National “does not seem to have any care” for struggling students.
“Just making all students sit the same test to get aggregate data at an oversight level won’t help the kids that are struggling.”
Tinetti said she was worried the minister was going “too far too fast”, and said the curriculum should not be a political football “changed every three years”.
It’s worth noting how things turned out on her watch.
In December, we learned that New Zealand had recorded its worst ever results in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of reading, maths and science amid an unprecedented global decline in performance.
RNZ reported at the time:
This country’s 15-year-olds’ average scores in the PISA dropped a disastrous 15 points in maths to 479 points, their science and reading scores fell just 4-5 points to 504 and 501 points respectively, and the gap between rich and poor students grew.
The declines continued a long-term trend of falling scores dating back to at least 2009 and happened despite New Zealand’s average results being skewed upward by about 10 points due to a low participation rate in the assessments held in term three 2022.
Fair to say other countries did not do so well, either, and the PISA report said the Covid-19 pandemic was partly to blame for the poor results.
New Zealand’s scores were above the OECD averages in all three subjects, though only just so for maths.
Considering all 81 participants, this country ranked 10th in reading, 11th in science and 23rd in maths.
Nevertheless, New Zealand’s results showed a decrease in high performers and an increase in low performers over the past 20 years in all three subjects.
The effect was strongest in maths where the percentage of low performers increased from 15 percent of New Zealand 15-year-olds in 2003 to 29 percent in 2022 while the percentage of high performers dropped from 21 to 10 percent in the same period.
Perhaps Tinetti believes our performances would have improved if we had stuck to the policies that produced those results.
The government’s decision to tack a different tack is recorded among the latest posts on the government’s official website:
Moreover, National “does not seem to have any care” for struggling students.
“Just making all students sit the same test to get aggregate data at an oversight level won’t help the kids that are struggling.”
Tinetti said she was worried the minister was going “too far too fast”, and said the curriculum should not be a political football “changed every three years”.
It’s worth noting how things turned out on her watch.
In December, we learned that New Zealand had recorded its worst ever results in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of reading, maths and science amid an unprecedented global decline in performance.
RNZ reported at the time:
This country’s 15-year-olds’ average scores in the PISA dropped a disastrous 15 points in maths to 479 points, their science and reading scores fell just 4-5 points to 504 and 501 points respectively, and the gap between rich and poor students grew.
The declines continued a long-term trend of falling scores dating back to at least 2009 and happened despite New Zealand’s average results being skewed upward by about 10 points due to a low participation rate in the assessments held in term three 2022.
Fair to say other countries did not do so well, either, and the PISA report said the Covid-19 pandemic was partly to blame for the poor results.
New Zealand’s scores were above the OECD averages in all three subjects, though only just so for maths.
Considering all 81 participants, this country ranked 10th in reading, 11th in science and 23rd in maths.
Nevertheless, New Zealand’s results showed a decrease in high performers and an increase in low performers over the past 20 years in all three subjects.
The effect was strongest in maths where the percentage of low performers increased from 15 percent of New Zealand 15-year-olds in 2003 to 29 percent in 2022 while the percentage of high performers dropped from 21 to 10 percent in the same period.
Perhaps Tinetti believes our performances would have improved if we had stuck to the policies that produced those results.
The government’s decision to tack a different tack is recorded among the latest posts on the government’s official website:
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In her statement, Erica Stanford said the Coalition Government is introducing “consistent assessment tools” so no matter where you live in New Zealand, parents and teachers will know more about how our young people are learning.
From 2025, all children in their first year of schooling will have an opportunity to run through a phonics check, to help teachers understand how well a child can read words by sounding out letters.
This will be done after 20 weeks of schooling and repeated after 40 weeks.
“It will help teachers identify and arrange additional support for those who need it right at the start of the child’s education,” Stanford says.
Progression monitoring on reading, writing and maths will also be introduced for children in years 3 through 8.
These will be done twice each year and will inform teachers about the next steps needed for a child’s learning.
The Curriculum Insights and Progress Study, which provides a national view of literacy and numeracy against the New Zealand Curriculum, will also be expanded. From 2025, it will assess reading, writing and maths annually for Years 3, 6 and 8.
Further work is being done to review the types of targeted and tailored support we make available for those who need additional help.
Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton
2 comments:
PM going to USA for NATO meet, how is he traveling.
Commercial airline hopefully.
Tinetti spouting out a whole pack of platitudes like 'one- size -doesn't -fit -all' is as infuriating and ignorant as it is unimaginative.
The deeply flawed ideology of Whole Language perpetrated in Reading Recovery(RR) produced more reading failures than the whole word reading method it replaced. RR led to us having the longest tail of under-achievement in the developed world. Cognitive science condemns the methods of RR because of the ingredient of three -cueing which has the child concentrate on the picture, context and a little implicit phonics which is causes cognitive overload and confusion if you then add in explicit phonics.
Give us a break, Jan, use your brain. If a child fails a test the teacher is directed to give remedial work for that child straight away. Not wait until they are six years old and then get more flawed RR. Where is your evidence RR , mixed with more phonics works? There isn't any. If a child doesn't know certain phonemes then practise that specifically.
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